The San Jose City Council on Tuesday unanimously rejected a labor union’s eleventh-hour challenge to the planned relocation of the storied Garden City Casino to a site near the airport.

There was no opposition in May, when the council unanimously approved zoning changes to allow Garden City to move to a six-acre site on Airport Parkway, across the freeway and North First Street from San Jose’s other card room, Bay 101. Garden City also plans to have a restaurant, live entertainment and, eventually, a hotel.

After the planning director approved the development permit for the cardroom’s relocation in December, Unite Here Local 19, which represents hotel workers as well as employees of rival Bay 101, appealed. The union argued that the project requires more thorough analysis of traffic and other environmental impacts.

“This process is not worthy of a city that prides itself on transparency and open government,” said Ben Field, representing the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council.

But some city officials suggested that the real reason behind the appeal wasn’t environmental concerns — but whether employees at any future hotel on the site would be union.

“I remember the last time this came to the council, we didn’t have nearly as many questions as today,” Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio said in moving to cut off council debate. “Behind the scenes, we know there’s the issue of whether the maybe future hotel will be union or not.”

Councilmen Kansen Chu, Ash Kalra and Xavier Campos joined the majority in denying the appeal after losing a bid moments earlier to postpone a decision 30 days to allow additional environmental review.

“We need to put people to work, but do we have the best project for the city?” asked Campos, who as a planning commissioner last year had joined in its unanimous May 5 recommendation of the zoning changes allowing the cardroom relocation.

After the hearing, Enrique Fernandez, Unite Here’s business manager, denied that the appeal was motivated by a dispute over unionizing future employees.

“We didn’t think it had been studied properly,” Fernandez said, adding that the union is “assessing” its next move, which could include a lawsuit.

Cardrooms have had a colorful past in San Jose, including indictments in the 1980s and ’90s for profit-skimming and tax fraud, bankruptcies and years of litigation with the city on fees and regulations owners say are more burdensome than those in other cities.

With chronic budget deficits eroding public services, city voters in June overwhelmingly approved a measure that eased cardroom restrictions in exchange for increasing the tax on their operations. City officials hoped it would deliver an additional $5 million a year, but with gamblers checking their bets amid a sour economy, tax receipts have been short of expectations.

Garden City, San Jose’s oldest cardroom, has been at its Saratoga Avenue site since the 1970s. It traces its roots to 1946, when the Dalis family bought a downtown billiard hall. Its title refers to San Jose’s former nickname during its agricultural heyday.

Garden City’s current owners bought the club about five years ago and, eager to break with the past and the old stories, sought to rebrand the cardroom in its future location at 50 Airport Parkway as Casino Matrix. Plans call for an 88,000-square-foot casino complex with an eight-story tower featuring a 20,000-square-foot gaming area, up from the current 12,000 square feet.

Owner Eric Swallow has said he envisions a top-floor restaurant with a celebrity chef, live entertainment and a hotel with up to 600 rooms. The hotel, however, is part of a second phase and plans have yet to be submitted for it.

Swallow didn’t speak at Tuesday’s meeting, but he said earlier this year that he’s open to having union workers at a hotel — but that the question is premature because he doesn’t yet have a hotel project. The appeal, he said, is holding up an $82 million construction project that will employ unionized builders. The project will provide 1,100 design and construction jobs and permanent employment for 800.

City officials said the project conformed with a master environmental study for North San Jose development that already has undergone extensive review and litigation with neighboring jurisdictions.

John Woolfolk is a city news editor for the Bay Area News Group, based at The Mercury News. A native of New Orleans, he grew up near San Jose. He is a graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and has been a journalist since 1990, covering cities, counties, law enforcement, courts and other general news. He has been an editor since 2013.

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